My first experience was using an IBM 360 at our state university's 100th anniversary engineering exhibit in the 1966-1967 academic year. I could beat the computer at every game it was programmed to play, except tic-tac-toe, in which we always tied, and I could solve math problems faster than anyone else could enter them into the computer, so I figured that computers were a fad and decided to pass on getting in on the ground floor.
The first I owned was a Radio Shack something-or-other that had 256K of RAM, which was more than enough to run Deskmate, and I think its operating system was DOS 2.0. I wanted more RAM, but couldn't come up with the $100 needed to buy a 1 MB add-on.
1) ...It was a punch tape teletype terminal connected to the Dartmouth College system...
My former business partner studied computer science at Dartmouth under professor John Kemeny in that era. Kemeny was one of the developers of BASIC. A mutual friend of ours at UNH became a computer hacker in the early 1970s. UNH was one of the schools that was part of Dartmouth's incipient "time sharing" system, and anyone at a UNH computer terminal could simply dial a four digit "Centrex" phone number and get connected to that computer from UNH, with the school paying for the telephone and computer time, so my friend guessed correctly that if he were off campus, he could accomplish the same thing by preceding that number with the school's three digit "exchange" number of 862-. My friend's theory went untested until he got up enough balls to walk into Kewitt Computation center and walk out the door with an entire computer terminal including an acoustic coupler. He then abused the computer from his home until one day his father said , "I don't know where you got that stuff from, but get it the hell out of here!"
The geniuses that set up the security for Dartmouth's computer system weren't smart enough to think to use "control characters" to conceal passwords. When a user entered his password, it was physically typed onto the paper in his terminal, and then the computer hastily overtyped several characters to obscure it, but my same friend who stole the terminal had other skills as well, like evenly erasing the top layers of ink, and so he would take the contents of the computer center trash cans home and successfully retrieve some powerful passwords. When he got access that way to the account of a professor who had, "line print" permission, he made the line printer print random numbers until an attendant finally shut it off.
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